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Post by lemming13 on May 5, 2011 8:25:06 GMT
There is almost certainly a thread somewhere already about this author, but I can't find it; the search engine keeps sending me to the old Vault board. So anyway, thanks to the wonders of ebooks I have just gone through his In Secret and Slayer of Souls novels, and there's a very good reason why the only thing of his that sees much printing is his King in Yellow sequence - it's because he wrote the most dire tripe. In Secret is a romantic spy thriller that reads like John Buchan rewritten by a team of PG Wodehouse and Barbara Cartland, I gave up after Chapter Six with the all-American hero (having fought off the screaming abdabs after the diabolical Hun made him an alcoholic and become a clean and fabulous person again) striding about the Highlands in a kilt with a fishing rod, fighting off Hun spies armed with banjos while his all-American heroine bravely swims six miles to fetch him fresh ammo. Believe me, it sounds much more fun than it is. Slayer of Souls is a bit better, being focused on a white teenager who has been forcibly dragooned into a Yezidi demon cult (Yezidis being, apparently, the same as Germans - aka the foul Hun - Mongols, Bolsheviks and Hashishin. At least Sax Rohmer had a clue what the tribes and cults her wrote about actually were.) and escaped, only fending off her pursuers by use of the magic they taught her. But it soon goes down the pan when she is recruited into the American intelligence services by an all-American hero, who wants her for a secret weapon against the evil Yezidi Hun Mongol Assassin Bolshevik conspiracy. I think I'll stick with Fu Manchu for my racist pulp conspiracy thrillers; the writing is far, far better.
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Post by andydecker on May 5, 2011 9:47:30 GMT
In Secret and Slayer of Souls novels, and there's a very good reason why the only thing of his that sees much printing is his King in Yellow sequence - it's because he wrote the most dire tripe. I read somewhere that chambers was a bestelling writer at his time, but for his romantic stuff. He wrote about 90 novels, contemporary and children books, but the only thing that endured was his King in Yellow. An essays once wrote that he is the originator of the "evil book". I don´t know if this is true, but if Lovecraft & co - not to mention Marion Zimmer Bradley - hadn´t used his ideas I guess he would be totally unknown today. I read his King in Yellow, and it is a weird sequence. Some of its parts have truly weird alternative world/sf-setting which make many of the so-called racist pulp seem tame and lame in comparison. America is an isolationists wet dream with public suicide chambers while the rest of the world falls into anarchy. And at the end of the first story everything we know may not be true because the narrator dies in an asylum. The whole King in Yellow stuff is just the background for some atmospheric stories which are more about the decadence of artists then some working plots. But you have to grant him that this King in Yellow mythology - to call it that - is eerie stuff which is so open to interpretion that it "inspired" enough horror writers to fill a shelf. One of the best stories using the elements may still be Karl Edward Wagner´s The River of Night´s Dreaming, but there are a lot of others out there.
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Post by lemming13 on May 6, 2011 7:37:50 GMT
Oh, I'm not knocking the King In Yellow - I only shunted the paperback out because I got a Kindle edition and needed the space for Crowley's The Drug. I was very impressed with those stories, very strange and disturbing. But his spy thrillers are awful. I'm pretty sure they were written as magazine serials and on the fly, because he doesn't even keep internal continuity. In Secret changes tone completely between chapters, and though he starts each with a recap of the basic plot points of his story (American boy escapes from Hun prison camp carrying the Great Secret and is hunted by evil German scum while US intelligence girl spy tries to cure him of alcoholism inflicted by Hun and learn the Secret) he seems to forget the details of the previous episode. And the crudity of the propaganda in them is just nauseating. I think Kipling (often wrongly criticised for excessive patriotism) would have called him a 'jelly-bellied flag-flapper'. I know HPL is somewhat racist but in these stories, Chambers makes him look politically correct.
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Post by andydecker on May 6, 2011 10:04:28 GMT
. I think Kipling (often wrongly criticised for excessive patriotism) would have called him a 'jelly-bellied flag-flapper'. I know HPL is somewhat racist but in these stories, Chambers makes him look politically correct. S.T.Joshi wrote about him: Chambers was an intellectual dilletante who wrote whatever came to his mind at the moment. He left some immortal horror and fantasy tales which have to painfully lifted out of a mound of trash. (This is not the actual quote, I am re-translating here.) You are 100% right, lem, in the racismn department Chambers is beyond the pale.
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Post by Knygathin on Feb 21, 2012 5:11:05 GMT
Lin Carter thought The Slayer of Souls was great.
Are you sure it's garbage? At least it seems to have very exciting exotic elements in it. Some criticism I have read on the internet sound so anxiously PC that it rules out the book simply for racist reasons, letting this sway their overall opinion unfavorably.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Feb 21, 2012 12:24:44 GMT
I've read the novella version of Slayer of Souls and thought it was absolute garbage--not fun trash, just depressingly unimaginative and mean-spirited. According to S. T. Joshi, the full novel is much worse (he calls in the "nadir of [Chamber's] career" and says that there's "not a single redeeming element in this novel"). Hard to believe that this came from the same guy who wrote the excellent supernatural stuff from The King in Yellow.
On the other hand, I'm sort of fond of In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, two Chambers books that consist of loosely connected--and mostly tongue-in-cheek--stories dealing with what we'd now call cryptozoology. The tone gets a bit precious at times, but the books are a lot more fun than I expected (then again, my expectations were about as low as they could go after reading The Slayer of Souls). The most famous piece from them is probably "The Harbor-Master." Both books are included in Chaosium's 643-page The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers, which collects way more of the man's work than you'll ever want to read (though I did manage to make it all the way through--a real test of endurance at times).
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Post by Knygathin on Feb 21, 2012 14:15:18 GMT
I once had "The Harbor-Master" (supposedly inspired Lovecraft's amphibian creations) from In Search of the Unknown in a Necronomicon Press booklet, but wasn't particularly fascinated with the story, and eventually got rid of it. I understand there are more stories in that book, telling of invisible beings and other stuff.
I have enjoyed The King in Yellow. Of course!
And I remember liking the "Maker of Moons" short-story, with its romantical Eastern magic elements. I was thinking Slayer of Souls perhaps had something similar.
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Post by Dr Strange on Feb 21, 2012 16:16:12 GMT
I'm sort of fond of In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, Both are here - www.strangeark.com/czfiction.html (along with a great collection of other cryptozoological stories). I read "The Third Eye" (from Police!!!) somewhere else recently, but can't remember where - must have been in some old anthology I picked up from somewhere, I guess. Personally, I found The King In Yellow very hit and miss - I'll take Bierce over Chambers any day.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Feb 21, 2012 18:14:38 GMT
I'm sort of fond of In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, Both are here - www.strangeark.com/czfiction.html (along with a great collection of other cryptozoological stories). That's an excellent list. I particularly like the Hodgson stories on it. A more recent author of some great cryptofiction is Sterling Lanier, who wrote a series of stories about Brigadier Ffellowes and his encounters with the uncanny.
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Post by Dr Strange on Feb 22, 2012 9:42:42 GMT
I read "The Third Eye" (from Police!!!) somewhere else recently, but can't remember where - Now I remember - it's in Hugh Lamb's Forgotten Tales of Terror (1978).
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